Jack Black, Thespian

Q: How does a comic actor avoid becoming a punch line? A: Work with talented directors.

IF YOU'RE A COMIC ACTOR in the movies--and this goes double if you clawed your way to film stardom from the trenches of TV sketch comedy, which you almost certainly did--here's what you know without a doubt yet cannot bear to contemplate: However beloved you may be at the moment, America will soon be sick to fucking death of you. It's inevitable. All you can do, really, is decide which of the two traditional routes to public apathy and ennui you'd prefer to travel. Most comedians, sensibly enough, opt for the "laughing all the way to the bank" decline, which involves grabbing every multimillion-dollar opportunity that presents itself during a brief window of tolerability: death by overexposure (impending casualty: Will Ferrell). For a more prolonged flameout, on the other hand, the "crying on the inside" approach offers a proven, if embarrassing, track record. You might even win an Oscar for earnestly informing Matt Damon that it's not his fault. It's not his fault. It's not his fault.

So here's the mystery: Why am I not yet weary of Jack Black? Six years after his star-making turn as an obnoxious record-store clerk in High Fidelity, his persona remains exactly the same: heavy-metal self-delusion. In essence, Black is the demonic flip side of Mike Myers's affable head banger Wayne Campbell; the ferrety smirk and beer-gut posturing implicitly proclaim, "You're not worthy!" So overweening is his mock arrogance that he seems to be playing air guitar even when he's actually playing the guitar. In theory, such lack of range should get old in a hurry. And it's not as if Black's new film, Nacho Libre, in which he plays a monastery cook who decides to become a Mexican wrestler, suggests any kind of new direction, apart from the novelty of the curly fright wig and the pseudo-Montalban accent. Yet I can't wait to see it.

Now, in part that's because Nacho Libre is the second movie by Jared Hess, whose debut, Napoleon Dynamite, boasted the most loopily distinctive comic sensibility seen since the Farrelly brothers concocted their bizarre amalgam of the good-natured and the grotesque. But then, that's hardly a coincidence. Quick, who directed Along Came Polly? The Waterboy? Anchorman? Bruce Almighty? As a rule, former sketch comics who hit the big time work with anonymous drones, thereby ensuring that nobody's "vision" usurps their sovereignty. Black comes from that same world. You can see him on early episodes of Mr. Show, and Tenacious D, his musical-comedy act with Kyle Gass, wrangled a short-lived HBO series. As a film actor, though, he's signed on almost exclusively with heavyweights: the Farrellys (Shallow Hal), Richard Linklater (School of Rock), and Peter freakin' Jackson (King Kong). Even Envy, the stinker he made alongside Ben Stiller, was directed by Academy Award winner Barry Levinson.

Odd though the idea may seem, Jack Black looks very much as if he's actually striving to be an actor. Not an Actor, mind you; that's what happens when Jim Carrey decides he wants to be Jimmy Stewart (The Majestic), or when Bill Murray, suddenly a critics' darling after two decades as our reigning sarcastic slob, hooks up with Jim Jarmusch and restrains himself into a melancholy coma (Broken Flowers). Black isn't dumb enough to ditch the manic energy that got our attention in the first place. We won't be seeing him in a biopic anytime soon. (Fortunately for him, the John Belushi movie has already been made; it took poor Michael Chiklis more than a decade to recover.) Even in King Kong, he was clearly cast expressly for his wild-eyed gusto, his sheer overpowering Jack Blackiness. Sure, it's a shtick, but shtick calcifies only when left to its own worn-out devices. In the hands of talented filmmakers, it becomes infinitely malleable.

You can get a strong sense of this just by watching the Nacho Libre trailer. As Nacho, Black is still recognizably himself, all flaring nostrils and dagger eyebrows and utterly unwarranted self-confidence. At the same time, though, there's an unmistakably Napoleonic cadence to the dialogue. Hess favors inane statements spoken with a straight face, as when Nacho, decked out like a cross between a hospital orderly and Greg Brady, tells Ana de la Reguera's nun (see page 35), "These are my recreation clothes." Part of the fun is watching Black tailor his talent to Hess's single-minded specifications--just as Black seemed much more heartfelt in the hands of the Farrellys and suddenly became interested in other people when he starred in a Linklater movie. There's a great deal of humility involved in letting artists use you as modeling clay. Combine that humility with a persona composed of pure, uncut hubris and you get the sort of internal contradictions that might, at least for a while, keep an actor from going stale.

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